I must like cooking...

Every now and then I get this itch to cook, a tickle in my brain and fingertips that verges on mild anxiety. It usually follows a drought of home cooking and consists of rabidly looking up recipes, making shopping lists, and strategizing on my way to work.

This past Saturday was supposed to bring snow. In anticipation, I planned a day of staying in and cooking, largely spurned on by the high percentage of canned soups I'd been consuming.

My plan was to cook multiple dishes that I would then freeze- a boon to my health and my finances. I invited friends over to hang out and taste test as needed, a sort of culinary open house.

The to-do list: pinto bean burritos, Whiskey Black Bean soup, pierogies, mac & cheese, orange shortbread and cereal. The burritos came from Martha Stewart (she's a bitch, but knows her stuff); the soup is from kitchenplay; the pierogies a combination of epicurious, Daniel and kitchenplay; the mac & cheese was going to be made up (but I knew I wanted to incorporate my guilty pleasure cheese, Laughing Cow); the shortbread and cereal were adapted from epicurious and the Metropolitan Bakery Cookbook, respectively.

A few things I found helpful over the course of the weekend...

• start with a CLEAN kitchen


• accept the fact that the kitchen will then proceed to get VERY messy


• order take-out for dinner so you don't OD on the food you are making for future consumption. (Not surprisingly, we got Thai food.)


• invite friends... they sample things, entertain you, and even offer a hand (which for assembling pierogies is a MUST! the more the process resembles an assembly line, the better.)


• Make sure you have good Tupperware and enough saran wrap for freezer storage. I found these nice Ziploc containers for my soup and also used former take-out containers (right).

Ever the theoretical over-achiever, I had envisioned accomplishing my food goals by the end of the day Saturday, when the impending snow would keep me housebound anyway. The snow didn't happen and I didn't get everything done, but was able to finish up on Sunday (with the exception of the mac & cheese, but eh... a girl's gotta get some sleep.)

Speaking of which, I'm heading to bed now but will post the recipes themselves later this week. Oh, and not everything actually made it into the freezer. As of tonight (Tuesday), the shortbread is kicked, the pierogies demolished, one soup is down and I'm still working my way through the left over burrito and pierogie filling.

Is it the cooking I like so much... or the eating?